probably 25 years ago or thereabouts, I was on vacation in Cuba and they had an arcade cabinet there with a game I have not seen since. I recall very little about the game but here's what I know.

It was very much akin to metroid it its art style and gameplay. You started on the surface of a planet that was very rich in plant life - like maybe a jungle and this is a side-scrolling platformer like any mario game but your character was closer to Samus, running to the right, jumping, with some sort of gun or arm canon that could be upgraded with powerups. The enemies were all alien - plant or insect in nature and the one vivid memory I have just after starting a new game was running in a straight line to the right, firing the entire time and there were these large man-sized flowers laying flat on the ground. Let's call them venus fly traps. You would run over them and as long as you ran fast enough they wouldn't get you, the petals would come up and close in your wake as you ran past. Otherwise if you lingered, they'd eat you. They had maybe 3-4 bit pink/red petals I recall. Anyway I don't remember much else about the game except that I went through a lot of quarters on it. Anybody ever come across something like this?

Gahhhrrrlic wrote:With a name like that, I'm surprised you guys remember it so keenly. I can't even pronounce it.

When I was a kid, the Aladdin's Castle in my city that had received one new but it was called "F/X". A couple of years later I ran into it again at a bowling alley not too far from that Aladdin's Castle but it was Xain'd Sleena. In the late 90's I discovered the whole emulation scene and I remember very vividly the first Xain'd Sleena emulator being released around '98 and the site mentioned something about the alternate names, including F/X. I played that until it got incorporated into MAME.

I've got over 30 years on that game. It's not that hard to remember it, even if you can't pronounce the name.

I used to play it in the late 80s in a "moving" arcades - this was whole lot of arcade machines in some tents that moved around like Circuits from town to town. They stayed around for 3-4 weeks.

Never knew the name of the game. I played it a lot and even finished it many times. After the emu scene came around I searched and found it. But never played it much again. But I have fond memories. In that time I played only two games - this and KiKi KaiKai that I still play from time to time.